Could Tax Credits Fund New Transit Lines?

MetroTransit light rail in Minneapolis. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Why can’t we do prefab here?: Sweden is one of the world’s leaders in prefabricated housing. Modules are constructed in factories and then sent to the building site to be assembled into single- and multi-family housing units. The on-site assembly process usually takes about five weeks. While we may wish to copy their success here in the US, to do so we need to address our bespoke and overly prescriptive building and zoning codes. (Marina Bolotnikova | Vox)

Zoning mismatch costing Americans: Zoning codes have separated out land uses from each other for the claimed purpose of reducing nuisance. But those cases are rare and the actual result of zoning is requiring land uses that are not the most economically productive. Comparing US cities with the unzoned City of Taipei, researchers found that the US would improve economic welfare 9% by reducing the economic disparity that zoning creates. (Neil Weinberg | Chicago Booth Review)

Transportation and Moore’s Law: Computing power has increased exponentially since the invention of the microchip, contributing to amazing advances in technology. But while technology advances, transportation and especially congestion has gotten worse over time. Ray Delahanty believes that this is because smart phones, which have improved in computing power, have slowed down response times at intersections and the geometry of cities and the vehicles we use to travel in them remain unchanged. (Ray Delahanty | CityNerd)

A transit tax credit for capital projects: Transit capital projects are currently funded under a grant program administered by the Federal Transit Administration that can be time-consuming and cumbersome, and is small compared to demand. Researcher Yonah Freemark believes that one possible way to make funding more predictable and improving project delivery timelines is creating a direct pay tax credit similar to the ones for energy infrastructure in the Inflation Reduction Act. (Yonah Freemark | Tax Policy Center)

The food desert that feeds: West Long Beach, part of the larger city of Long Beach in California, is designated as a food desert, a place where there are limited options for purchasing healthy food. But Rajiv Ahuja believes that cities and organizations that map such places only including what’s missing and not the community infrastructure and informal networks that exist to remedy shortcomings. Ahuja suggests that food access should be rethought under the idea of food capacity, which entails tracking what already exists on the ground. (Rajiv Ahuja | Planetizen)

Quote of the Week

Which projects did NEPA delay while I was at US DOT? Bridge repairs and transit investments, ports and roadway safety projects, congestion pricing for New York City, and a project to build a community grid in place of a highway in Syracuse, New York. Which projects moved through the NEPA process largely unchanged and without a successful court challenge? Pretty much every major highway expansion.

-Former FHWA administrator Stephanie Pollack in Streetsblog USA discussing the potential impacts on transportation of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (permitting reform bill).

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Naama Blonder to talk about her book she wrote with her partner Misha Bereznyak entitled Building Charm: A Hyper Practical Guide to Developing Outstanding New Neighborhoods. We chat about the book’s focus on human scale and how it radically rethinks street design.\

Want more links to read? Visit The Overhead Wire and signup.